A Head Full of Ghosts

A modern classic of possession horror that refuses to tell you whether the possession is real. When fourteen-year-old Marjorie Barrett starts displaying signs of either acute schizophrenia or demonic possession, her desperate family agrees to let a reality TV crew film an exorcism. The story is told fifteen years later by Marjorie’s younger sister Merry, who was eight when everything fell apart.

Why This One

Paul Tremblay won the Bram Stoker Award for this novel, and Stephen King said it “scared the living hell out of me.” What makes it genuinely unsettling is its refusal to resolve the central ambiguity. Is Marjorie possessed by a demon, or is she a mentally ill teenager being exploited by her family and a TV network? Tremblay layers the narrative with a horror-blog commentary track that picks apart the reality show in real time, adding another unreliable perspective to an already unreliable story.

The occult elements here are filtered through media spectacle. The real horror is not the possession but the family disintegrating around it: a father who turns to religion, a mother in denial, and a little girl watching her sister become someone unrecognizable. At 286 pages, it is sharp, fast, and deeply disturbing.

What to Expect

A multi-layered narrative that jumps between past and present. The blog posts within the novel provide dark humor and genre commentary. The ending is deliberately ambiguous and will stay with you for days. If you want clear answers about what is real and what is not, this book will frustrate you. If you want horror that makes you question every narrator and every assumption, this is it.